TY - JOUR
AU - Lovenheim,Michael F.
AU - Owens,Emily G.
TI - Does Federal Financial Aid Affect College Enrollment? Evidence from Drug Offenders and the Higher Education Act of 1998
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 18749
PY - 2013
Y2 - February 2013
DO - 10.3386/w18749
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18749
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18749.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Michael Lovenheim
Department of Policy Analysis and Management
Cornell University
102 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
Tel: 607/255-0705
Fax: 607/255-4071
E-Mail: mfl55@cornell.edu
Emily G. Owens
University of Pennsylvania
Department of Criminology
3718 Locust Walk, McNeil Building
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6286
Tel: 215-746-2076
Fax: 215-898-6891
E-Mail: emilyo@sas.upenn.edu
AB - In 2001, amendments to the Higher Education Act made people convicted of drug offenses ineligible for federal financial aid for up to two years after their conviction. Using rich data on educational outcomes and drug charges in the NLSY 1997, we show that this law change had a large negative impact on the college attendance of students with drug convictions. On average, the temporary ban on federal financial aid increased the amount of time between high school graduation and college enrollment by about two years, and we also present suggestive evidence that affected students were less likely to ever enroll in college. Students living in urban areas and those whose mothers did not attend college appear to be the most affected by these amendments. Importantly, we do not find that the law deterred young people from committing drug felonies nor did it substantively change the probability that high school students with drug convictions graduated from high school. We find no evidence of a change in college enrollment of students convicted of non-drug crimes, or of those charged by not convicted of drug offenses. In contrast to much of the existing research, we conclude that, for this high-risk group of students, eligibility for federal financial aid strongly impacts college investment decisions.
ER -